A number of attempts have been made over the years to create useful aids to assist the smokers to deal with their nicotine addictions. The most successful product for this purpose has been nicotine chewing gums. Another type of product for this purpose was a smokeless cigarette which however could not satisfy FDA requirements. Since oral ingestion of nicotine vapours was considered to be a very effective way to aid in smoking cessation a lot of developments have been made to create good and safe products in this respect. Such products have been described in detail in e.g. the U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,736,755, 4,917,120, 5,167,242, 5,400,808, 5,501,236 and 6,098,632, the contents of which are incorporated in this patent application. A product based on one or more of these patents have been developed and marketed under the brand name Nicorette® Inhaler®. In this product the nicotine is loaded in a porous polyolefin plug which plug is enclosed in a cylinder (cartridge) being made of an injection moulded impact modified acrylonitrile-methyl acrylate copolymer (Barex® from BP Lima Chemicals, 1900 FORT AMANDA ROAD, LIMA, Ohio, US). The atmosphere in the cylinder is evacuated and replaced by nitrogen gas. Both ends of the cylinder are sealed with aluminium foil. The foil has also a layer of the same copolymer (Barex®) that is heat sealed on the cylinder edges.
The very specific modified acrylonitrile-methyl acrylate copolymer used for this purpose has turned out to be very expensive. It has now surprisingly been found that a much less expensive material may be used to replace this copolymer and the invention is based on this finding.